


Invocation

by scullywolf



Series: TXF: Scenes in Between [171]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: (just the one in the episode), Child Death, Gen, Introspection, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 00:03:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11817006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullywolf/pseuds/scullywolf
Summary: Scully has developed something of a fraught relationship with what she's come to think of as her "mental Mulder."





	Invocation

_“I told you… he’s not sick.”_  
_“Good. Then he can talk.”_

She looks down and puts her hands on her hips, frowning. She has absolutely no idea what is going on, here.

_C’mon, isn’t it obvious?_

Scully’s frown becomes a full-fledged scowl. She has developed something of a fraught relationship with what she's come to think of as her “mental Mulder.” 

Coping with Mulder’s absence has required her to compartmentalize her thoughts and feelings about him. He told her not to lose herself searching for him, and she’s trying her goddamned best. No matter what, she _cannot_ afford to lose perspective or the ability to do her job. So she goes to his apartment a few times a week to feed the fish, but she hasn’t slept there since the night she found his journal. There are moments in the dark when she allows herself to miss him, to worry about him and cry into her pillow, but for the most part, tight control over her emotions means that those moments arrive on her terms. Mostly.

The “mental Mulder,” however, tends to show up unannounced. His voice chimes in before she can stop it, almost always when she finds herself stuck somehow. Rationally, she understands that anything “he” might have to offer is information she already knows. It’s not as though Mulder is actually speaking with her telepathically. She hears him because she knows him well enough to imagine exactly how he might respond in almost any given situation.

That knowledge and imagination are both a blessing and a curse.

It is frustrating to lose control like this, to have him invade her thoughts without her express consent. On the other hand, she knows he only shows up because she needs his perspective in order to move the case forward. There’s a reason X-File cases tend to go unsolved in the face of traditional investigation. Her default skeptical, scientific approach was beneficial when paired with Mulder’s willingness to entertain the most extreme possibilities. Now, though… Agent Doggett may be a fine investigator, who cares deeply about his job and about solving these cases, but he provides no counterpoint to her usual approach. This case -- and all the others like it -- will be much harder, if not impossible, to solve unless _someone_ is willing to look beyond the mundane and the verifiable.

With Mulder gone, that someone is going to have to be her. And since she still doesn’t necessarily believe wholeheartedly, the way he does, her brain oh-so-helpfully presents these more extreme possibilities in the form of a conversation.

She relents with a sigh. _Fine. Tell me what’s so obvious, here._

_Think about it, Scully. This boy turns up completely out of the blue, after ten years, unaged. I’d call that one hell of an anomaly, wouldn’t you? So where have we seen anomalous medical results in returned missing persons before?_

Scully rolls her eyes, even though there’s no one there to see it. _This is more than just some elevated electrolyte levels or a blood cell count imbalance. Billy Underwood doesn’t fit any of the classic abductee patterns. He disappeared in broad daylight, amid dozens of witnesses. No one saw strange lights in the sky or experienced missing time. His parents reported no unexplained phenomena in or around their home either before he went missing or in the subsequent decade afterward. What’s happening here is so anomalous that it doesn’t even match the quote-unquote standard anomalies we’ve seen before._

_You don’t know that, yet. You’ve talked to Billy, examined him outwardly, but you haven’t looked at his medical records or test results._

Again, she’s frustrated. This isn’t helping. _I don’t need test results to know that a seven year-old boy born seventeen years ago is unlike any abduction case we’ve investigated in the past!_

_Maybe not, but it’s a place to start. And isn’t that what you need right now?_

It’s not enough. Not by half. But it _is_ better than nothing.

_I mean, unless you want to consider the possibility that Billy somehow time traveled--_

_Shut up, Mulder._

***

He doesn’t show up again until they find Billy Underwood’s remains.

_Chester Bonaparte_ , in Mulder’s voice, is the first thing that pops into her head when she looks down at the small, denim-clad skeleton.

It throws her at first; even though it’s her own subconscious that managed to dig up this little tidbit, she can’t place it right away. Her mental Mulder is silent as she hunts for meaning, like the answer is a word on the tip of her tongue. Bizarrely, the name makes her think of french fries, and then suddenly it clicks. The boy, the Haitian refugee, in North Carolina. It feels like a lifetime ago.

_There’s your precedent, Scully. We_ have _seen something like this before_.

Her rebuttal is half-hearted at best. _That could just have been a boy giving us a false name._

_You don’t really believe that._

She doesn’t know what in the hell she believes, anymore. She _does_ know, or at least suspect, how Agent Doggett will feel about this revelation, that the boy they’ve supposedly been investigating has in fact been dead for years. He is going to have some difficulty accepting it.

_That’s putting it mildly_ , mental Mulder interjects with a laugh.

Fine. He may well refuse to accept it, but his refusal won’t change the facts. Explaining about Chester, about the other corporeal entities she and Mulder may or may not have interacted with in the past, isn’t going to help him accept it, either.

_So what do I do? How do I help him understand?_

_Maybe there’s nothing you_ can _do. Maybe he just has to work it out for himself that there isn’t any other way to explain what you’ve seen here._

She thinks about her first year in this job, how hard it was to reconcile the things she saw with her fundamental understanding of how the world worked. She knows if Agent Doggett isn’t ready to accept it, then it probably doesn’t matter what she says or doesn’t say; her words won’t be enough, no matter how valid.

_At the end of the day, you caught a killer. Isn’t that ultimately the most important thing? No matter how curious I am about the supernatural aspects of our cases, even I can’t argue that it’s more important to prove the existence of a spectral entity than it is to put a child murderer behind bars._

It’s true. And more to the point, it is an approach that will make the most sense to Agent Doggett. She may not be able to help him come to terms with spending days interacting with some sort of ghost, but she can help him see that good work was done here. That they achieved what they set out to achieve, even if the details surrounding that achievement don’t make much sense.

Squaring her shoulders, she looks up from the shallow grave and goes to find her partner.


End file.
